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by Steko 5180 days ago
"AppleTV would surely be an ARM platform"

Battery life isn't an issue in the home and ARM can't really do full fledged ports of the most demanding and popular AAA console titles. So I'd expect an Intel chip. It could possibly have an ARM chip too but I'd guess emulation is good enough and higher profit. Alternatively they could put in a bunch of ARM chips but iOS just makes a lot more sense on paper. With an Intel chip you gain the whole iOS library and the whole OS X library. At that point the library and capabilities may be good enough to forego other console purchases for many consumers.
2 comments
kennywinker 5180 days ago
Not sure if you're insinuating that they would have to emulate arm to run iOS. There is absolutely no reason it couldn't run iOS on intel chips. The iOS simulator in Xcode is exactly that. Devs would have to re-compile their apps, but I assume the screen size would be different enough they would have to do that already.
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hej 5180 days ago
Noise is a problem. I'm not sure whether Apple wants to compromise on that.
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potatolicious 5180 days ago
The hypothetical Apple TV also has a very generous footprint, which gives Apple a lot of playing room for thermal management.

Not to mention, the current Mac Minis run dead silent with fairly speedy x86 chips.

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